Quick Takes on Seven Flicks

Quick Takes on Seven Flicks (1 of 8)

Although there are some 100 films in this year’s lineup, the centerpieces of the Hamptons International Film Festival are the Golden Starfish nominees, and this year, five narrative films and five documentaries from eight countries are in the running for the top honors.
In the narrative category, the festival is presenting Michael Roskam’s “Bullhead,” “Cracks in the Shell” by Christian Schwochow, “The Fairy” by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy, Joshua Marston’s “The Forgiveness of Blood,” and “Without” by Mark Jackson.
On the documentary side, the contenders are Julia Ivanova’s “Family Portrait in Black and White,” “Laura” by Fellipe Barbosa, Jennifer Fox’s “My Reincarnation,” “Scenes of a Crime” by Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock, and Jerzy Sladowski’s “Vodka Factory.”
Below, are our reviewers’ takes on a sampling of these as well as a few other films in this year’s schedule. The festival runs through Monday, with screenings and presentations at East Hampton Cinema, Guild Hall, the Montauk Movie, Sag Harbor Cinema, the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, the Southampton Cinema, and the Hampton Arts Cinema in Westhampton Beach.

“Family Portrait in Black and White” - Julia Ivanova (2 of 8)

East Hampton, Saturday, 1:15 p.m., and Sunday, 2:45 p.m.
An impoverished landscape is quickly followed by a skinhead rally in the opening sequence of “Family Portrait in Black and White,” a documentary set in Sumy, Ukraine.
Racism seems to permeate the culture of the former Eastern Bloc, and here a skinhead sets the tone of the film, proclaiming: “If a white and a subhuman produce an offspring, they can only create a product that will be an imbecile.”
Olga Nenya, the protagonist, mostly collects children whose black and white parents have abandoned them in orphanages, and raises them as her own in a farmhouse with no indoor toilet or hot water. Described by a foster child as running a totalitarian Soviet regime, she puts all 17 of them to work, and exercises strict control over a very organized house.
The children cannot make their own decisions until they are 18, and her altruistic motives become questionable as the film shows how she dictates fate when life-altering opportunities present themselves.
The girls (with the exception of one who has chosen to live in Italy with her adoptive parents, and incurs the wrath of Ms. Nenya) are relegated to the kitchen and largely ignored. Whether this is the intent of the filmmaker or Ms. Nenya is unclear. Either way, it is a glaring oversight as the narrative focus is on the boys’ plight.
While it may feel at times like a work in progress, the film is worth seeing for its jarring look at racism in the Ukraine and how it affects children of color. H.D.

“The Forgiveness of Blood” - Joshua Marston (3 of 8)

Guild Hall, East Hampton, Saturday, 5:15 p.m., Sag Harbor Cinema, Sunday, 9:15 p.m.
The contrasts of contemporary Albania, where horse-drawn carts share the road with modern vehicles and tech-savvy teenagers text love notes to their sweethearts even as society is still ruled by certain centuries-old codes, are evident from the first shots of Joshua Marston’s fascinating follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2004 film, “Maria Full of Grace.”
While the American director shot that one entirely in Spanish, “The Forgiveness of Blood,” filmed on location in a small Albanian town, was shot entirely in Albanian. That approach alone is almost reason enough to check out this film, one of five in contention for the festival’s Golden Starfish Award for best narrative feature.
The film centers around Nik, a teenager on the brink of first love who dreams of opening an Internet cafe, and his younger teenage sister, Rudina, a model student with a bright future ahead of her. But their family has been embroiled in a long-running land feud with a neighboring clan and their hopes are quashed when the feud finally turns bloody. With their father and uncle blamed for the murder of one of their neighbors, a 15th-century Balkan code known as the Kunan dictates that the men of the family, including Nik and his young brother, must remain in indefinite isolation in their house until the offended family agrees to engage a mediator. It could be months, it could be years, and Nik, poised at the precipice of adulthood, chafes against the strictures of a tradition he thinks is outdated. His sister, meanwhile, must drop out of school and take over her father’s job delivering bread by horse-drawn cart in order to support the family.
As in “Maria Full of Grace,” Mr. Marston somehow manages to tell the story in such a compelling and knowledgeable way that a viewer would swear he had grown up in Albania and was sharing an insider’s perspective with the rest of the world. A strong cast propels the story forward and the cinematography of Rob Hardy, while paying tribute to the beauty of the rural Albanian landscape, also imparts a coldness and loneliness that are appropriate, given the characters’ isolation in their community. C.K

“Without” - Mark Jackson (4 of 8)

East Hampton, tomorrow, 6:15 p.m., and Sunday, 10 p.m.
In film school they teach you about the art of slow disclosure, and about the directors who excelled at it, Alfred Hitchcock being perhaps the most well known.
The slow-disclosure method of storytelling has its opposite in newspaper writing in which the whole tale is supposed to be told in the first paragraph. Films in which a plot is too quickly or too slowly revealed can be disappointing. Hitchock’s genious was the timely way in which he dropped his hints in the first and second acts, to deliver a surprising payoff in the third.
“Without,” a film by Mark Jackson, is an exercise in slow disclosure, and it works. On the face of it, the story is simple. A young woman accepts a job to take care of an elderly mute and wheelchair-bound man so that his family can take a short vacation. She travels by ferry to a wooded island where the man’s house is located. The actress Joslyn Jensen plays the caregiver, who must administer physical therapy to the man as well as feed, dress, and bathe him.
The twists in the plot are so surprising, so disturbing, that to reveal them here would be irresponsible. Let’s just say that neither the caregiver nor the care-receiver are who they appeared to be at the start. An entire subplot — or, is it the real story — is brought to the surface with great understatement.
The caregiver has no Internet or cellphone service and has been instructed to keep the TV on a fishing channel for the old man. The notes that accompanied Mr. Jackson’s film to the Hamptons International Film Festival state that “Without” deals with “the intersection between technology and social isolation.” Well, maybe that too, but the film is much more nuanced than that.
Two special moments come in scenes in which Ms. Jensen picks up a ukulele and sings a song whose haunting lyrics are projected in a voice that is at once sweet, lovesick, and chilling.
A few of the scenes are rather graphic, and the story is not likely to raise many spirits. “Without” ain’t “The Sound of Music,” but it’s a well-made, engaging film that is quite unforgettable. R.D.

“Scenes of a Crime” - Blue Hadaegh, Grover Babcock (5 of 8)

East Hampton, Saturday, 5 p.m. and Monday, 6:45 p.m.
“Scenes of a Crime” traces the interrogation and eventual confession of Adrian Thomas, a father of seven in Troy, N.Y., accused of killing his infant son.
Winner of the Grand Jury Award at the 2011 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the documentary delves deeply into the arguably flawed nature of police interrogation, exploring the meticulous methods behind the psychological breaking down of a suspect that can often result in a false confession.
Toggling between exhausting clips of interrogation footage, medical experts, the district attorney’s office, and a professor who studies the psychosis behind the nature of false confessions, the film wears the viewer down, too. We not only bear witness to Adrian’s archetypal struggle to convey his sense of reality, but also the implicit fear in becoming a cog in a defective system.
“Scenes of a Crime” is a harrowing reminder of how ambiguous justice can be, marked by a relentless desire for a perpetrator to punish, as opposed to discovering the truth. C.T.

“Pelotero” - Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin and Jonathan Paley (6 of 8)

East Hampton, Saturday, 5:15 p.m., and Sunday, 4:30 p.m.
“Pelotero” follows a season of Major League Baseball recruitment in the Domincan Republic, which has the largest number of future league players per capita. It focuses on the stories of two young prospects, both eager for a multimillion-dollar payday in the wake of record-breaking signing bonuses in that country.
With so much money at stake and desperate poverty in the country’s slums, families eager to raise themselves out of their economic plight and baseball trainers who receive up to 35 percent of a recruit’s signing bonus, have falsified records and identities of players to keep them at 16. This is the magic age when major league teams want these players in order to get the most out of their investments in them.
The intensity of the training and recruitment, along with the rising and falling fortunes of the players, makes for a compelling documentary. The filmmakers spent a year in the country gathering their material, but not one scene from the sun-drenched wealthier tourist areas is ever seen. Here, the only view is the gritty and patchy practice diamonds and the sad living environments of the families.
The story becomes much more than a predictable fairy tale for the players as each encounters vast changes in his fortunes. The twists and turns of each of their stories viscerally demonstrate the flaws in this system and how greed often works the opposite way it was intended. J.L.

Caris’ Peace” - Gaylen Ross (7 of 8)

East Hampton, Monday, 3 p.m.
A woman’s sudden change from being a beautiful graduate of the Yale School of Drama — catapulted into the fast lane to Broadway, television, and movie roles — to an overweight diabetic minus her pituitary gland and short-term memory is the subject of “Caris’ Peace,” a documentary about Caris Corfman, who was 43 when a benign pituitary tumor was disovered to be the cause of her headaches and mood changes.
A contemporary of Rebecca Wilson, Tony Shalhoub, Lewis Black, Kate Burton, and Tim Curry, Ms. Corfman could sing, dance, and act beautifully, as is shown in snippets that are woven into the narration by the surgeon who operated on her in the late 1990s, her father and brother, her friends, and also scenes from the one-woman show she put together that helped her get back to the stage.
The hope was that being in the familiar context of the theater, Ms. Corfman’s brain might eventually build new pathways that would help her compensate for the part of it that was removed and with it her ability to store new information.
On the whole this film is riveting, moving, amusing, and, ultimately, tragic with a perfect choice of music, even if a tad too long. I.C.

“Bullhead” - Michael R. Roskam (8 of 8)

East Hampton, tomorrow, 8:45 p.m., and Saturday, 1:30 p.m.

“Bullhead” or “Rundskop” is one of those movies that stays with you in subtle and not so subtle ways. For all of its beer-making and waffle-eating jolliness, Belgium is a somewhat mysterious country full of disquiet and ethnic tension between the Dutch-speaking north and the French-speaking south.
The screening copy of this contender for a Golden Starfish Award for best narrative did not allow viewing on a DVD player, which is a pity, as the filmmaker infused his film with some of the backlit moody scenery that has made Belgium’s art one of its most famous exports. The film needs that break from the bleak rainy or nighttime scenes that explore the world of a hormone-infested mafia-run meat cartel and a strange byproduct of its personalities.
The doomed character from which the film derives its name has suffered an inhumane and tragic loss that makes him dependent on hormones himself to maintain his existence. But his environment causes him to push his boundaries, abusing the black market he uses for cattle hormones for his own, increasingly extreme, needs.
His story is set against a backdrop of a corrupt system unraveling from its own greed and unfortunate alliances. It is one of those films that practically announces that it will not end well, but like a production of “Hamlet” or “Macbeth,” keeps the viewer occupied with just how this ending will be reached. Its layered subtleties are a refreshing but intense antidote to Hollywood’s more blatant storytelling. J.L.